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ORATION 



ADBRESSED TO THE 



CITIZENS OF THE TOWN OF QUINCY, 



FOURTH OF JULY, 1831, 



FIFTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 



INDEPENDENCE 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



—/ /<0^^^^^^^^^ 



BY JOHN QUINCY ADAMSj 



BOSTON: 
RICHARDSON, LORD AND HOLBROOK. 



1831. 



o 



^6C?(^^1 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1831, 

By Thomas Phipps, Noah Curtis and William Seaver, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District of Massachusetts, 



boston press WATER STREET. 



QuiNcy, July6, 1831. 
Hon. John Q. Adams. 

Sir, — Agreeably to a vote passed on the 4th inst. at the Town Hall, by 
those who listened to your learned and eloquent address, and in behalf of the 
Committee of Arrangements, chosen by the citizens of Quincy, we present to 
you our united thanks therefor, and respectfully request a copy for the press. 

» Th. Phipps, ^ 

Noah Curtis, S Sub-committee, 

William Seatee, i 



[IPPS, ^ 

ns, and > 

EAVER. 5 



Messrs. Thomas Pi 
Noah Curti 
William SEi 

QuiNCY, 13th July, 1831. 
Gentlemen, 

A copy of the address, prepared at the request of the citizens, inhabitants 
of Quincy, on the occasion of their recent celebration of our national anniversary, 
is, in compliance with your request, submitted to your disposal. It may be proper 
to apprize you, that, to avoid too great prolixity, some passages of it were omit- 
ted in the delivery. 

I am, with great respect, gentlemen, 
your friend and fellow citizen, 

John Q,uinct Adams. 



O R A T 1 O IN . 



Friends, Countrymen, and Fellow Citizens — 

The celebrations of this anniversary have been 
so frequent and multiplied throughout the Union, for 
a period now largely stretching upon a second half 
century, that a speaker, far more competent to bor- 
row for support in his flight the wings of imagina- 
tion, than he who now addresses you, might well open 
his discourse, by entreating your indulgence, and de- 
precating your censure. Even the powers of speech, 
the special prerogative of man, as a member of the 
animal creation, are not unlimited. The discourse 
of reason, though looking before and after, is bounded 
in its vision by an horizon ; and Eloquence herself 
perhaps best performs her appropriate office by si- 
lence upon exhausted topics. 

The independence of the North American Union 
is, however, susceptible of being considered under a 
great variety of points of view. The contemplation 
of its causes must indeed ever remain the same ; 
bnt that of its consequences varies from year to 
year. A speaker, on the first anniversary after the 
Declaration, in the midst of the terrific conflict to 
maintain it, and while its expediency, if not its 
justice, was yet pending upon the issues of war, had 



a far different theme from him who now, after the 
lapse of nearly two generations of men, is called to 
review the progress of principles then proclaimed, as 
their influence has expanded upon the mind of civi- 
lized man. The tost of all principle is time ; and 
that which when first announced as truth, may be 
treated by the almost unanimous voice of mankind 
as pernicious paradox or hateful heresy, when scru- 
tinized by long observation, and felt in practical re- 
sults, may become an axiom of knowledge, or an 
article of uncontroverted faith. The astronomer, 
who in his nightly visitation of the heavens perceives 
a ray of light before unobserved, discovers no new 
phenomenon in nature. He is only the first to dis- 
cern the beam which has glowed from the creation 
of the world. After-observation and the calculations 
of science, will disclose whether it proceeded from a 
star fixed in the firmament from the birth of time, 
from a planet revolving around the central luminary 
of our own system, or from a comet, " shaking from 
its horrid hair, pestilence and war." 

The Declaration of Independence was a manifesto 
issued to the world, by the delegates of thirteen 
distinct, but united colonies of Great Britain, in 
the name and behalf of their people. It was a 
united declaration. Their union preceded their inde- 
pendence ; nor was their independence, nor has it 
ever since, been separable from their union. Their 
language is, " We the Representatives of the United 
States of America, in General Congress assembled, 
do, in the name and by the authority of the good 
PEOPLE of these Colonies, solemnly publish and de- 
clare that these United Colonies^ are, and of right 



ought to be, free and independent States." It was 
the act of one people. The Colonies are not named ; 
their number is not designated ; nor in the original 
Declaration, does it appear from which of the Colo- 
nies any one of the fifty-six Delegates by whom it 
was signed, had been deputed. They announced 
their constituents to the world as one people, and 
unitedly declared the Colonies to which they respect- 
ively belonged, united, free and independent states. 
The Declaration of Independence, therefore, was a 
proclamation to the world, not merely that the 
United Colonies had ceased to be dependencies of 
Great Britain, but that their people had bound them- 
selves, before God, to a primitive social compact of 
iinion, freedom and independence. 

The parties to this compact were the people of thir- 
teen Colonies of Great Britain, located upon the con- 
tinent of North America, occupying territories con- 
tiguous to each other, and holding a political exist- 
ence founded upon charters derived from successive 
sovereigns of that island. These charters were of vari- 
ous import, nor was there any link of union, or even of 
connexion between them ; but in all, the rights of 
British subjects had been solemnly secured to the 
settlers under them, and among the first of those 
rights, was that of freedom from arbitrary tax- 
ation. The first of the charters had been granted by 
James the First of England and Sixth of Scotland, 
the first British monarch of the House of Stuart. 
The most recent of them had emanated from George 
II., of the House of Hanover, a family, which, by 
a revolution in the maternal island, had supplant- 



ed that of the Stuarts on the British throne. That 
revolution itself had been the result of a long and 
sanguinary conflict between the primary principles of 
human authority and of human freedom. In the 
preceding ages, England had been, for nearly one hun- 
dred years, the theatre of desolating civil wars upon 
a question in the theory of goverment, as insignificant 
to the people of the realm, as if it had been upon the 
merits of the badges respectively assumed by the 
parties to the strife. 

If an historian or an orator should affirm, that one 
of the most spirited and intelligent nations upon earth 
had inflicted upon itself, for a term little short of a 
century, all the horrors and desolations of a civil war, 
to ascertain and settle which, of a White Rose or a 
Red Rose, breathes the sweetest fragrance — the asser- 
tion might not be literally, but it would be more than 
figuratively true. The question between the Houses 
of York and Lancaster, was, whether upon the death 
of a King of England, childless, the right to his crown 
devolved upon the son of a brother, previously de- 
ceased, but who had been next to himself by birth, or 
to his own surviving younger brother. This is a ques- 
tion whidi could not possibly arise under any govern- 
ment, other than a hereditary monarchy, and in 
which the people who were the victims of the con- 
troversy, had, abstracted from the respective personal 
qualities of the pretenders to the crown, no more in- 
terest than in the dissensions in the kingdom of Lilli- 
put on the question whether an egg should be broken 
at the big or at the little end. But the civil wars of 
the British nation in the seventeenth century were of 
a very diflerent character. The question then was, 



not who had the right to the throne, but what were 
the rights of the throne ; not, upon whose head the 
polished perturbation and golden care of the crown 
should descend, but what was the lawful extent of 
power in him who wore it ; what the extent of ob- 
ligation upon the people to yield obedience to him ; 
what their right and duty to defend themselves 
against his encroachments ; and what their just and 
lawful remedy against the abuses of his authority. 
It was the question between right and might, be- 
tween liberty and power ;— a question the most solemn 
and momentous of any that can be agitated among 
men ; — a question upon the issues of which war be- 
comes the most imperious of human obligations, and 
the iield of battle the sublimest theatre of heroic mar- 
tyrdom and patriotic achievement. 

In the progress of this controversy, the British 
nation had been twice brought to the decision, that 
the individual at the head of their government, had, 
by his usurpations and oppressions, forfeited his 
right to the crown ; and in the first of these instan- 
ces, his life. In the exasperation of feelings, stimu- 
lated by a long and cruel civil war, they had tinged 
the scaffold with the blood of their king; 'and then, 
by one of those reactions of popular sensibility, which 
never fail to follow the violation of the laws of hu- 
manity, they had passed from one extreme to an- 
other, and worshipped as a saint and martyr him whom 
they had beheaded as a tyrant. Proceeding in the 
second instance with more caution, they had suffered 
the offender to escape, and then construed his flight 
for life, as a voluntary abdication of his power. 
This they declared he had done, by breaking the ori- 
2 



10 

ginal contract between king and people. And thus, 
bj the deliberate and solemn determhiation of the 
British nation, it had been settled, that the supreme 
powers of government, under their political constitu- 
tion, were possessed and exercised by virtue of an ori- 
ginal contract with the people. 

The charters of the thirteen North American Col- 
onies were also original contracts between the king 
and the people to whom they had been granted. It 
was a right exercised by most of the European mon- 
archs in those ages, and also by the republican gov- 
ernment of the Netherlands. By long usage and 
common consent it had become an acknowledged 
attril>ute of colonizing power ; and in Great Britain 
was a royal prerogative in which the Parliament had 
no agency. The existence of the Colonies, therefore, 
was from the beginning independent of the authority of 
Parliament. Their contract was with the king. 

In the reign of George III., when, by a succession 
of wars commenced after the final downfal of the 
House of Stuart, the British nation had become hea- 
vily burthened with debt, and consequeiirtly with tax- 
ation, an English Chancellor of the Exchequer con- 
ceived the ingenious idea of recommending him.self 
to the people of his own island, by casting off a por- 
tion of their burdens upon the people of the Colonies ; 
as the Knight of La Mancha was disposed to propi- 
tiate the lady of his affections, by scourging the back 
of his Squire : and as it had been w^ell ascertained, 
since the days of John Hambden and ship-money, 
that the oyal authority, however competent to the 
grant of charters, did not extend to the arbitrary levy 
of money by taxation, the minister undertook to per- 



11 

form by act of Parliament, that which he did not 
dare to attempt by the mere authority of the king. 

By their original constitution, the Colonies were 
independent of the Parliament. They were not re- 
presented in that body. They had no share in the 
election of the House of Commons. The levying 
of taxes upon them by Parliament was precisely 
the same usurpation, as the levying of ship money 
had been in Charles I. It was the privilege of 
British subjects, that no part of their property could 
be taken from them but by an authority in which 
they were represented. To this principle the Col- 
onies appealed in their first remonstrances and resis- 
tance against the Stamp Act. It was not the bur- 
den of tax to w^hich they objected. It was to the 
inherent servitude of the principle. 

Alarmed at the vehemence and unanimity with 
which the first attempt at arbitrary taxation was 
resisted in the Colonies, the ministers of George III. 
prevailed upon Parliament to repeal the tax, but at 
the same time to declare their right to make laws for 
the Colonies in all cases whatsoever. 

This declaration of right, was a mere declaration 
of power. The judges of England had declared 
that Charles I. had the right to levy ship-money ; 
and that declaration was neither more unjust nor 
more absurd than this. In either case the mere ques- 
tion whence the right was derived must be fatal to 
its assertion. In both cases the claim was found- 
ed upon an erroneous first principle of government, 
very far from being eradicated even at this day, in 
our own age, and our own country ; a principle un- 
der which the pillars of our Union are tottering while 



n 

1 speak, and which, if once permitted to prevail, will 
leave us a monumental ruin, 

" To point a moral, or adorn a tale." 

The British Parliament derived their claim of right 
to make laws for the Colonies in all cases whatsoever, 
from a principle of government which is stated by the 
great commentator upon the laws of England thus ; — 
" There is, and must 6e," sajs he, " in all forms of gov- 
ernment, however they began, or by what right so- 
ever they subsist, a supreme, irresistible, absolute, 
uncontrolled authority, in which the jura summi im- 
perii or the rights of sovereignty, reside." These are 
his words, which he further explains by saying, that 
by the sovereign power is meant the making of laws. 
And in treating of the power of Parliament, he 
adds ; — " This is the place where that absolute despo- 
tic power, which must in all governments reside 
somewhere, is entrusted by the constitution of the 
British kingdoms." These are again his words. 

Behold, my fellow citizens, the cause of the North 
American Revolution ! Look at that cold exanimate 
Hint, which, clashing with the steel of your fathers' 
hearts, struck out the spark and kindled the flame 
which reduced to ashes the British dominion in these 
United States; — nor ceasing there, its burning brands 
have floated on the wings of the winds back to Eu- 
rope, instinct with unextinguishable fire, and spread- 
ing at once light and conflagration throughout the 
regions inhabited by civilized man, — a false definition 
of the term sovereignty ; an erroneous estimate of the 
extent of sovereign power ! 

It is not true that there must reside in all govern- 
ments an absolute, uncontrolled, irresistible, and des- 



13 

potic power: nor is such power in any manner essential 
to sovereignty. The direct converse of the proposition 
is true. Uncontrollable power exists in no govern- 
ment upon earth. The sternest despotisms, in every 
region and every age of the world, are and have been 
under perpetual control ; compelled, as Burke ex- 
presses it, to truckle and to huckster. Unlimited 
power belongs not to the nature of man ; and rotten 
will be the foundation of every government leaning 
upon such a maxim for its support. Least of all can it 
be predicated of any government professing to be 
founded upon an original compact. The pretence of 
an absolute, irresistible, despotic power, existing in 
every government somewhere^ is incompatible with 
the first principle of natural right. Take for exam- 
ple the right to life. The moment an infant is born, 
it has a right to the life which it has received from 
the Creator. Amiable and benevolent moralists have 
sometimes denied that this right can be forfeited to 
human laws, even by the commission of crime. With- 
out concurring in that sentiment, we may safely affirm, 
that no human being, no combination of human be- 
ings, has the power, I say not the physical, but the 
moral power, to take a life not so forfeited, unless 
in self-defence or by the laws of war. No power 
in government exists to take it without a cause ; 
none, surely none, in the British Parliament. Nor 
let me be told that governments have exercised and 
do exercise this power; that the ancient Romans 
Hnd the modern Chinese hold it no wrong in the pa- 
rent to expose his new-born child, and leave it to per- 
ish in its own helplessness. — Fathers ! Mothers ! 
is this the law of nature ? Christians ! is this the 



14 

law of your Redeemer ? Americans ! ask the Dec- 
laration of Independence, and that will tell you that 
its authors held for self-evident truth, that the right 
to life is the first of the unalienable rights of man, to 
secure, and not to destroy which, governments are in- 
stituted among men, and that the sovereignty which 
would arrogate to itself absolute, unlimited power, 
must appeal for its sanction to those illustrious ex- 
pounders of human rights, Pharaoh of Egypt, and 
Herod the Great of Judea. 

Yet upon this false position, and upon this alone, 
rested the claim of the British Parliament to tax the 
Colonies, and to make laws for them in all cases 
whatsoever. Take away this imaginary attribute of 
sovereignty, and the Stamp Act and the Tea Tax 
were no better than highway robbery. Take it 
away, and the British Parliament had no more right 
to tax the Colonies, than the Parliament of Paris, 
or the Sultan of Constantinople. 

The power of Parliament to tax the Colonies, was 
denied in America, from the first appearance of the 
Stamp Act, with a vigor and energy, characteristic 
of a just claim of right. But the independence of 
the Colonies upon Great Britain, was neither pre- 
tended nor contemplated by the great body of the 
people. The relations between a parent state and 
her colonies, are founded upon the laws of nature 
and nations, modified by the civil constitution of the 
colonizing state. In the administration of human 
affairs, there is, in all countries, a reluctance at re- 
curring to the first principles of government. Prac- 
tical men are apt to entertain the opinion that they 
have little influence upon the conduct of nations. 



15 

and theoretic men are often wild and fanciful in their 
application of them. The first British colonies 
upon this continent were settled precisely at the 
time when the English nation were in the very fever 
of controversy preceding the civil wars. Those of 
New England were settled by the Puritans, a con- 
scientious, intrepid and persecuted race of men, whom 
David Hume, the Atheist Jacobite, at once their re- 
viler and their eulogist, acknowledges to have been 
the sole and exclusive founders of all the freedom of 
the British islands. This record is true, and oceans 
of calumny will never wash it out. 

In their emigration from Europe, they had well 
considered the rights to which they would be enti- 
tled in the land of their new habitation, and the obli- 
gations by which they would be bound to the land 
of their nativity. They retained their aifection for 
their country, and acknowledged their allegiance to 
the sovereign from whom they had received their 
charters. It was impossible, however, that the sen- 
timent of local patriotism should be transmitted to 
their descendants, with the same intenseness with 
which they had felt it themselves ; and the ties of 
allegiance to a sovereign beyond the seas, changing 
in rapid succession from a Stuart to a Common- 
wealth, from a Commonwealth back to a Stuart, 
then to a William of Orange, to the wife of a 
Prince of Denmark, and finally to a family and na- 
tive of Germany, however strong as political liga- 
ments, by the unchangeable laws of nature, could 
not have a very tenacious hold upon the heart. The 
Scottish poet, who has emblazoned his country with 
such a resplendent crown of glory, and has arrayed 



16 

in the gorgeous coloring of imagination this senti- 
ment of patriotism, supposes it to burn only in the 
bosom of him who in colloquy with himself can ex- 
claim, 

" This is my own, my native land." 

But to what land would this exclamation, so na- 
tural, so affecting, so pathetic, have applied upon 
the lips of Carver and Bradford, of Endicott and Win- 
throp ? Their native land indeed was England : but 
this might more emphatically be termed their own 
land, for it had become their own by sacrifices, dan- 
gers, and toils. And what, five generations later, 
would have been the purport of the same impressive 
line, 

" This is my own, my native land," 

upon the lips of your Quincy, and your Hancock, pa- 
triots, if ever the name existed in other than poetical 
imagery, one born in the metropolis within reach of 
your eyes, and the other within hearing distance of 
the voice, which now joys in recalling him to your 
memory, as your native townsman and his own. 

The dependence, then, of the Colonies upon Great 
Britain, at the time when the British Parliament de- 
clared its own right to make laws for them in all 
cases whatsoever, and undertook to give effect to 
this declaration by taxation, was a dependence of 
parchments and of proclamations, unsanctioned by 
the laws of nature, disavowed by the dictates of rea- 
son. To this condition, however, the Colonies sub- 
mitted as long as they were suffered to enjoy the 
rights of Englishmen. The attempt to tax them by 
a body in which they had and could have no repre- 
sentative, was in direct violation of those rights. The 



17 

acts of Parliament were encountered by remon-' 
strance, deprecated by petition, and resisted by force. 
Ten years of controversy, and more than one of civil 
war, preceded the Declaration, " that these United 
Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and in- 
dependent states ; that they are absolved from all al- 
legiance to the British crown, and that all political 
connexion between them and the state of Great 
Britain, is, and ought to be totally dissolved." 

The union of the Colonies had preceded this De- 
claration and even the commencement of the war. 
The Declaration was joint, that the United Colonies 
were free and independent states, but not that any 
one of them was a free and independent state, sep- 
arate from the rest. In the Constitution of this Com- 
monwealth it is declared, that the body politic is 
formed by a voluntary association of individuals ; 
that it is a social compact, by which the whole peo- 
ple covenants with each citizen, and each citizen 
with the whole people, that all shall be governed by 
certain laws, for the common good. The body po- 
litic of the United States was formed by the volun- 
tary association of the people of the United Colonies. 
The Declaration of Independence was a social com- 
pact, by which the whole people covenanted with 
each citizen of the United Colonies, and each citizen 
with the whole people, that the United Colonies 
were, and of right ought to be, iVee and independent 
states. To this compact, union was as vital as free- 
dom or independence. From the hour of that De- 
claration, no one of the States whose people were 
parties to it, could, without violation of that primitive 
3 



18 

compact, secede or separate from the rest. Each was 
pledged to all, and all were pledged to each by a 
concert of souls, without limitation of time, in the 
presence of Almighty God, and proclaimed to all 
mankind. The Colonies were not declared sovereign 
states. The term sovereign is not even to be found 
in the Declaration ; and far, very far was it from the 
contemplation of those who composed, or of those 
who adopted it, to constitute either the aggregate com- 
munity, or any one of its members, with absolute, un- 
controllable or despotic power. They are united, 
free and independent States. Each of these properties 
is equally essential to their existence. Without union 
the covenant contains no pledge of freedom or inde- 
pendence ; without freedom, none of independence 
or union ; without independence, none of union or 
freedom. 

In the history of the world, this was the first exam- 
ple of a self-constituted nation proclaiming to the 
rest of mankind the principles upon which it was 
associated, and deriving those principles from the 
laws of nature. It has sometimes been objected to 
the paper, that it deals too much in abstractions. 
But this was its characteristic excellence ; for- upon 
those abstractions hinged the justice of the cause. 
Without them, our revolution would have been but 
successful rebellion. Right, truth, justice, are all 
abstractions. The Divinity that stirs within the soul 
of man is abstraction. The Creator of the universe 
is a spirit, and all spiritual nature is abstraction. Hap- 
py would it be, could we answer with equal confi- 
dence another objection, not to the Declaration, but 
to the consistency of the people by whom it was 



19 

proclaimed ! Thrice happy, could the appeal to the 
Supreme Judge of the World for rectitude of inten- 
tion, and with firm reliance on the protection of Di- 
vine Providence for support, have been accompanied 
with an appeal equally bold to our own social insti- 
tutions to illustrate the self-evident truths which we 
declared ! 

The Declaration of Independence was not a de- 
claration of liberty newly acquired, nor was it a form 
of government. The people of the Colonies were 
already free, and their forms of government were 
various. They were all Colonies of a monarchy. 
The king of Great Britain was their common sove- 
reign. Their internal administrations presented great 
varieties of form. The proprietary governments 
were hereditary monarchies in miniature. New York 
and Virginia were feudal aristocracies. Massachu- 
setts Bay was an approximation to the complex gov- 
ernment of the parent state. Connecticut and 
Rhode Island were little remote from democracies. 
But as in the course of our recent war with Great 
Britain, her gallant naval warriors made the discove- 
ry that the frigates of the United States were line 
of battle ships in disguise, so the ministers of George 
III., when they brought their king and country 
into collision with these transatlantic dependencies, 
soon found to their astonishment, that the United 
American Colonies were republics in disguise. The 
spirit of the people, throughout the Union, was re- 
publican ; and the absurdity of a foreign and a royal 
head to societies of men thus constituted, had remain- 
ed unperceived, only because until then that head 
had been seldom brought into action. 



20 

The Declaration of Independence announced the 
severance of the thirteen United Colonies from the 
rest of the British Empire, and the existence of their 
people from that day forth as an independent nation. 
The people of all the Colonies, speaking by their re- 
presentatives, constituted themselves one moral per- 
son before the face of their fellow men. Frederic 
I., of Brandenburg, constituted himself king of 
Prussia, by putting a crown upon his own head. 
Napoleon Bonaparte invested his brows with the iron 
crown of Lombardy, and declared himself king of 
Italy. The Declaration of Independence was the 
crown with which the people of United America, 
rising in gigantic stature as one man, encircled their 
brows, and there it remains ; there, so long as this 
globe shall be inhabited by human beings, may it re- 
main, a crown of imperishable glory ! 

The Declaration of Independence asserted the 
rights, and acknowledged the obligations of an 
independent nation. It recognised the laws of na- 
tions, as they were observed and practised among 
Christian communities. It considered the state of 
nature between nations as a state of peace ; and, as 
a necessary consequence, that the new confederacy 
was at peace with all other nations. Great Britain 
alone excepted. It made no change in the laws — 
none in the internal administration of any one of the 
confederates, other than such as necessarily followed 
from the dissolution of the connexion with Great 
Britain. It left all municipal legislation, all regula- 
tion of private individual rights and interests, to the 
people of each separate Colony ; and each separate 



21 

Colony, thus transformed into a State of the Union, 
wrought for itself a constitution of government. 

There remained to be formed a confederate gov- 
ernment for the whole Union ; and of this, an abor- 
tive experiment was made by the co-operation of 
Congress with the State Legislatures, without re- 
currence to the fountain of power, the people. This 
error proved well nigh fatal to the Union, and to the 
liberties of the whole. It palsied in a great degree 
the subsequent operations of the war ; it prostrated 
the faith and energy of the nation in peace ; it be- 
came a source of impotence in all the relations of the 
country with foreign powers ; of mutual irritation, 
discord and anarchy at home. It disabled the na- 
tion from the performance of its engagements to oth- 
ers, and from the means of exacting the fulfilment of 
theirs in return. It degraded the country in the eyes 
of the world, and disgraced the glorious cause in 
which our national independence had been achieved. 
It embittered the hearts, and armed the hands of our 
citizens against one another, till our judicial tribunals 
were sullied with trials for treason, and our legislative 
records blackened with proclamations of rebellion. 

In our own Commonw^ealth, the blood of her citizens 
was shed by each other, on the field of battle, and 
the scaffold thirsted for that of her children. Never, 
even during the gloomiest moments of the revolu- 
tionary war, had the condition of the country been 
so calamitous as in the years immediately succeeding 
the peace, in the very triumph of our cause, and in the 
full and undisputed enjoyment of our independence. 

The primary cause of all these misfortunes and all 
these crimes, was the same mistaken estimate of 



sovereignty which the British Parliament had made, 
when they undertook to levy money upon the Col- 
onies by taxation. The separate States of the Union, 
using a term which appears to have been studiously 
avoided in the Declaration of Independence, declared 
themselves, not only free and independent, but sove- 
reign States ; — and then their lawyers, adopting the 
doctrine of Blackstone, the oracle of English law, in- 
ferred that sovereign must necessarily be uncontrolla- 
ble, unlimited, despotic power. Assuming, like the 
eminent commentator, that in all governments this 
power must exist somewhere, and that it is inherent 
in the very definition of sovereignty, with about as 
much plausibility as he deposits it in the British 
Parliament, they made no hesitation to entrust it to 
the governments of the separate States. 

It were an abuse of your time and patience, fellow 
citizens, to recall to your memory all the vagaries 
into which this political sophism of identity between 
sovereign and despotic power, has led, and continues 
to lead, some of the Statists of this our happy but dis- 
putatious Union. It seizes upon the brain of a heat- 
ed politician sometimes in one State, sometimes in 
another, and its natural offspring is the doctrine of 
nullification ; — that is, the sovereig?i power of any 
one State of the confederacy to nullify any act of 
the whole twenty-four States, which the sovereign 
State shall please to consider as unconstitutional ; — 
an error sustained by reasoners too respectable to be 
treated with derision, and, apart from that considera- 
tion, too absurd to be encountered with serious argu- 
ment, j^ven under our present Federal Constitution, 
it has been directly asserted, or imprudently counte- 



23 

nanced, at one time in Virginia and Kentucky, at 
another in Massachusetts and Connecticut, now in 
the temperate climate of Pennsylvania, and again in 
the warmer regions of the South. Fortunate has it 
been for our country, that the paroxysms of this fever 
have hitherto proved not eittensively contagious ! But 
we are admonished by one of the profoundest philo- 
sophers of modern ages,* not to measure the danger 
of discontfuitmentsinthe body politic by this, — wheth- 
er they be just or unjust ; nor yet by this, whether 
the griefs whereupon they rise, be great or small — 
neither to be secure, because they have been often 
or long, without ensuing peril. Not every fume or 
vapor turns indeed to a storm, but from vapors and 
exhalations imperceptibly gathered, the tempest of 
desolation does come at last. 

It was this hallucination of State sovereignty, iden- 
tified with unlimited power, which blasted the Con- 
federation from its birth. The delegates in Con- 
gress were representatives of the State Legislatures ; 
for as such only they acted in the formation of the 
articles of confederation. The State Legislatures 
were representatives of the people of each separate 
State. Between these two representative bodies^ 
primary and secondary, of the same parties, a Con- 
federation was elaborated for the whole Union, mem- 
orable only for its impotence. 

It was formed by many of the same pure and ex- 
alted patriots, who had pledged their lives, their for- 
tunes, and their sacred honor, to the independence of 
their country. It was made with long, painful and 

* Lord Bacon. 



24 

anxious deliberation, animated with the most ardent 
love of liberty, purified with perfect disinterestedness, 
and digested with consummate ability. It was a 
bloodless corpse ! Fire from Heaven alone could 
have given it life ; and that fire, unduly sought, brought 
with it Pandora and her box. in the establishment 
of the Confederation the people of the whole Union 
had no part. It was an alliance of States, intent 
above all things to preserve their sovereignty entire ; 
averse above all things to confer power, because 
power might be abused ; and also because they per- 
ceived that every grant of power to the confederate 
body could be made only by the relinquishment of 
their own. These, however, were errors, not of inten- 
tion, nor even of judgment so much as of inexperience. 
The Union was a novelty. Self-government was an 
innovation. The idea of recurring to the people of 
the Union for a constitution, does not appear to have 
presented itself then to any mind. Yet the Declara- 
tion of Independence had been issued in the name 
and by the authority of the whole people. The total 
inefficiency of the Confederation to fulfil any of the 
good offices for which it was intended, reinspired the 
idea of recurring to the first source of all political 
power, the people. 

Thus rose to birth the Constitution of the United 
States under which we yet live. It was formed by 
a Convention of Delegates, appointed by the Legis- 
latures of the respective vStates, upon a recommenda- 
tion of Congress, under a profound conviction of its 
own incompetency to administer the affiiirs of the 
Union, either at home or abroad. The work of the 
Convention, when completed, was by their President, 



25 

Washington, transmitted to Congress ; and by them 
to the Legislatures of the several States. These, 
without undertaking to decide upon it themselves, re- 
ferred it back to the people, by whom it was sanc- 
tioned through the medium of Conventions specially 
elected in every State, who, after long investiga- 
tion, and severe scrutiny, accepted, adopted, and 
made it the supreme law of the land, anything in 
the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary 
notwithstanding. 

In the formation of Constitutions for the several 
States, similar errors of inexperience were commit- 
ted. The Constitutions were all republican, all popu- 
lar — not monarchical — not military. An article amen- 
datory to the Constitution of the United States, de- 
clares that the powers not delegated to the United 
States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the 
States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the 
people. There are powers, then, powers of govern- 
ment, reserved to the people, and which never have 
been delegated either to the United or to the sepa- 
rate States ; nor do the United States, nor the sepa- 
rate States possess any powers, not delegated to 
them by the people — by the people of the whole 
Union to the United States — by the people of each 
separate State to that State. Hence it follows, too, 
that the people of each State were incompetent to del- 
egate to the State, any power already delegated by 
the people of the whole Union to the United States. 
It was the people of the whole Union, who had de- 
clared the United Colonies free and independent 
States. But those States possessed no powers but 
4 



26 

such as has been delegated to the Colonies by their 
charters, or as, after their becoming States, were del- 
egated to them by the people. There was no such 
thing in their constitutions as an absolute, irresistible, 
despotic power, lurking somewher^e under the cabalis- 
tic denomination of sovereignty. In some of the 
States, the people thought it unnecessary to form new 
Constitutions. They abided by thecforms of govern- 
ment established by their charters. In one, the ordi- 
nary Legislature of the State modified their govern- 
ment without consulting the people ; — an usurpation 
sanctioned by the acquiescence of the people, until a 
very recent day, but now rectified. Of those which 
did form Constitutions during the revolutionary war, 
every one, New Jersey perhaps excepted, has within 
the first half century found a revisal of its own neces- 
sary. New powers have from time to time been dele- 
gated by the people of each State to their govern- 
ment ; po.wers previously delegated have been annul- 
led : but in vain would you search all the Constitu- 
tions past or present of the States, for a power- to 
nullify any act of the United States in Congress as- 
sembled. The people of no State were competent 
to grant such a power. The pretence to grant it 
would itself have been null and void — a violation of 
the Constitution of the United States; a violation 
of the Declaration of Independence. 

The most momentous error committed in the for- 
mation of several of the first State Constitutions, was 
the establishment of the legislative power in a single 
assembly of the representatives of the people. In 
the true theory of republican government, all the pub- 
lic functionaries are representatives of the people, 



27 

proxies to perform the will, and give action to the 
power, of the community. To mere theorists in the 
construction of the social edifice, there is no idea so 
seducing as that of simplicity. Now the simplest of 
all forms of representative government would be, that 
all the officers of the State should at short intervals 
of time be chosen by majorities of the people ; and 
that all the powers of government should be exercised 
by one elected body of men. This system was, how- 
ever, never proposed by any one in the United States. 
The division of the offices of government into legis- 
lative, executive, and judicial, had been long establish- 
ed in the British Colonies, though not very effectively 
settled in their organization. At the time of the 
Declaration of Independence, Montesquieu was one 
of the most recent and esteemed writers upon gov- 
ernment, and he had shown the division of powers 
to be essentially necessary to the preservation of lib- 
erty. Legislation, however, being merely the expres- 
sion of the will of the community, is an operation so 
simple in its nature, that inexperienced reason cannot 
easily perceive the necessity of committing it to two 
bodies of men, each having a decisive check upon the 
action of the other. At the first formation of our 
State Constitutions it was made a question of tran- 
scendent importance, and divided the opinions of our 
most eminent men. All the arguments derived from 
the analogy between the movements of political bodies, 
and the operations of physical nature ; all the im- 
pulses of political parsimony; all the prejudices against 
a second co-ordinate legislative assembly, stimulated 
by the exemplification of it in the British Parliament, 
were against a division of the legislative power. In 



28 

several of the States the force of these arguments 
was found irresistible. Pennsylvania was told, that a 
legislature in two branches was a wagon drawn by 
a horse before and a horse behind, in opposite direc- 
tions ; and she invested a single assembly with her 
legislative authority. Other States were actuated 
by the same image or by others equally plausible ; 
and a European philosophical statesman, once reputed 
profound, expressed, in his private and confidential 
correspondence with another, his dissatisfaction that 
most of the American States had confided their legis- 
lation to two concurrent bodies, instead of depositing 
all their authority in one centre, and that centre the 
nation. 

The experience of a very few years brought back 
all the members of the confederacy who had tried the 
experiment of the wagon with a single horse, to the 
team tackled with a pair ; and, as it was not found 
necessary to tackle them in front and rear of the car- 
riage, they have seldom manifested a disposition to 
draw in opposite directions, and never so obstinately 
as to arrest the progress of the car. When the Con- 
stitution of the United States came to be formed, the 
problem was sufficiently solved to settle opinions on 
this continent ; and not a solitary voice was heard to 
propose that the legislative power of the Union should 
be vested in a single assembly. 

This Constitution, rising from the ashes of the first 
experimental and imbecile Confederacy, has now been 
in successful operation upwards of forty years. It 
has undergone, since its first establishment, very few, 
and, comparatively speaking, unimportant alterations. 
It has passed through the ordeal of six successive ad- 



29 

ministrations ; and is at this time in the hands of a 
seventh. It has stood the test of one formidable 
foreign war, and of two apparent changes of princi- 
ple, effected by the conflict of parties, but resulting 
in no material change of the Constitution; and none 
in the administration itself, affecting in any percepti- 
ble degree the interest of the nation. It was origin- 
ally the work of the party denominated Federal, in 
opposition to that party which adhered with the most 
tenacious inflexibility to the unlimited sovereignty of 
the separate States. The administration of the gen- 
eral government, however, has been alternately con- 
fided to individuals attached to the one and the other 
of those parties ; and it is a circumstance which will 
not escape the observation of a philosophical historian, 
that the constructive powers of the national govern- 
ment have been stretched to their extremest tension 
by that party when in power, which has been most 
tenderly scrupulous of the State sovereignty, when 
uninvested with the authority of the Union themselves. 
Of these inconsistencies our two great parties can 
have little to say in reproof of each other. The 
charge on either side can be much more easily retort- 
ed than repelled. Our collisions of principle have 
been little, very little more than conflicts for place ; 
and in the mean time the nation has been advancins:, 
with gigantic strides, in population, wealth and power. 
That this has been, under the blessing of Providence, 
the result of the system, no one can doubt who will 
compare the condition of the country under the Con- 
federacy of State sovereignties, and under the Consti- 
tution ordained by the people of the United States. 
Yet no one of the administrations of the general gov- 



30 



ernment has ev^er given entire satisfaction to the 
whole people. Partial discontents have at different 
times been prevalent in different portions of the Union ; 
and the degree of inflammation with which they have 
raged, has seldom been proportioned to the magnitude 
of their exciting causes. Washington's administra- 
tion encountered an insurrection in arms. His im- 
mediate successor was upbraided for sparing the life 
of a convict for treason. Many attempts have been 
made to array separate, and even combined State sov- 
ereignties, against the government and laws of the 
Union ; and even at this day, the people of twenty- 
three of our States might shudder at the imminent 
danger of a dissolution of the Union, but for the an- 
ticipation that the most ardent instigators to that 
catastrophe at this time, may, on recovery from the 
angry passions by which they are stimulated, erase 
from their own memories, and strive to expunge from 
those of others, the records of their delusion ; won- 
der that they should ever have been suspected of dis- 
loyalty to the Union, for which even now they pro- 
fess an affectionate regard ; and, if their words and 
deeds should be too faithfully remembered by their 
country, recur to the acknowledgement of the poet, 
and exclaim, 

" We angry lovers mean not half we say." 

It is not to be expected that the present, or any 
future administration, will ever proVe satisfactory at 
once to the whole people. A condition of relative 
comfort and happiness is all that the lot of mankind 
upon earth can attain ; and if a denizen of the North 
American Union would form a candid estimate of 
the good and evil of his own destiny, let him com- 



31 

pare it with that of any other inhabitant of the globe ; 
or, contracting the comparison to that of the civ- 
ilized and christian portion of the earth, let him look 
abroad among the nations of Europe, and of their de- 
scendants in our own hemisphere, — the portions of 
mankind whose opinions and feelings and fortunes 
have been most deeply agitated and extensively in- 
fluenced by the principles proclaimed in our Declara- 
tion of Independence, — and draw an impartial parallel 
between their condition and our own. 

The first of the European nations, which followed 
us in the revolutionary career, was France. Her 
government was an absolute monarchy. The un- 
controlled, irresistible, despotic power, which. Black- 
stone and the jurists of the English school insist, 
must in every government reside somewhere, was in 
France vested in the person of the king. There was 
indeed an obsolete record of a constitution ; an as- 
sembly of the States General in three orders, no- 
bles, clergy and commons or third estate, which 
wore the semblance of a representation of the people. 

The very same year when the present government 
of the United States was first organized, this uncon- 
trolled monarch was compelled to call an assembly 
of the States General, a body which had not been 
permitted to meet before for nearly two hundred 
years. And this body did then no sooner assemble, 
than, under the influence of the principles promul- 
gated by our Declaration of Independence, the third 
estate, or popularrepresentation, assumed the supreme 
power to themselves, constrained the two other or- 
ders of nobles and clergy to unite with them in a 
self-constituted National Assembly, abolished the 



32 

monarchy, and, under the name of a royal democra- 
cy, fabricated m the space of two years the first of 
a succession of constitutions, which now, at the end 
of forty years after that event, they are still making 
and mending with enthusiasm scarcely less ardent 
than when they first began. In the mean time they 
have been scourged with five and twenty years of 
civil and of foreign war ; have inflicted on most of 
the other European nations, and suffered themselves, 
all the miseries and humiliations of conquest; have 
shed rivers of blood upon the scaffold ; have ranged 
through all the extremes of popular anarchy and of 
military despotism ; have beheaded, proscribed, re- 
called, reinstated, and expelled again the family of 
their ancient kings ; and now acknowledge a colla- 
teral member of the same family as their hereditary 
sovereign. It is obvious that the career of revolu- 
tion there is not yet closed. Throughout all these 
changes, the principles proclaimed in our Declaration 
of Independence, often overwhelmed by physical 
power, cowering under the sword of the soldier, 
withering under the imperial sceptre, laughed to 
scorn by the moral lectures of a foreign field mar- 
shal, and trampled in the dust by the heel of the 
Cossack, have hever been effectively subdued. They 
have always re-emerged from the pressure to keep 
them down, as if destined, like the immortal soul of 
man, to survive the ruins of creation. 

Fellow Citizens, I trespass upon the indulgence 
that I have invoked. Time fails me to pass in review 
the experiences of the other nations of the European 
continent, which, in the last half century, have been, 
and yet are, convulsed with the revolutionary spirit. 



33 

In comparing their history during this period with 
our own, there is one point of difference between 
them, on which our attention cannot be too intense- 
ly rivetted. Our Declaration of Independence, our 
Confederation, the Constitution of the United States, 
and all our State Constitutions, without a single ex- 
ception, have been voluntary compacts, deriving all 
their authority from the free consent of the parties 
to them. It may be doubted whether a single con- 
stitution has been formed in Europe or in Southern 
America, without some violence, some admixture 
of conflicting physical force in its confection. In the 
early and significant age of the ancient mythology, 
the god of boundaries was the only deity never to be 
propitiated by sacrifices of blood. He, too, was the 
only god who refused to yield his place, even to Ju- 
piter. Here is the land-mark, bloodless and im- 
moveable, more unerring than the magnet from the 
pole, firm as the everlasting hills, between freedom 
and force. It is not in the proclamation of princi- 
ples. Declarations of the rights of man, as full, as 
copious, as formal as our own, have decorated the 
constitutions of Europe. Those constitutions, after 
a short and fitful existence, have passed into the me- 
mory of things beyond the flood ; leaving the princi- 
ples behind — blood-stained and defaced — monuments 
only of their own mutilation. We have proclaimed 
the principles, we have adhered to the practice ; 
and our history has been a record of internal peace 
and general prosperity almost uninterrupted. Let 
the contemplation of the past, be the instructive les- 
son of the future. And in this connexion let us 
5 



34 

survey with calm, uiiblenching eye the newly leviv- 
ed doctrine of nullification ; a word which contains 
within itself an absurdity, importing a pretended 
right of one State in this Union, by virtue of her 
sovereignty, to make that null and void, which it pre- 
supposes to be null and void before. The doctrine is 
not new, nor are those who now maintain it respon- 
sible for its introduction. It has been the vital dis- 
ease of confederacies from the day when Philip of 
Macedon obtained a seat among the Amphyctions 
of Greece. It has never been, perhaps, involved in 
quite so much absurdity, as when appearing in its 
newest shape. It is now the claim for one State of 
this Union, by virtue of her sovereignty, not only to 
make, but to unmake the laws of the twenty-four, 
each equally sovereign with herself. This claim in 
its extent is most emphatically illustrated by its ap- 
plication to a revenue law. The Constitution of the 
United States declares that all duties, imposts, and 
excises shall be uniform throughout the United States. 
It forbids any preference to be given, by any regula- 
tion of commerce or revenue, to the ports of one State 
over those fo another. The claim for the sovereign 
State is to nullify these provisions of the Constitu- 
tion, indissolubly connected with all the acts of Con- 
gress for raising revenue. The Constitution of the 
United States, in express terms, supersedes all State 
Constitutions and laws conflicting with it. The sov- 
ereign State claims by her laws to supersede the 
Constitution of the United States, and the laws of 
all the other States in the Union. As a member of 
the Union, this advances a claim of appeal from the 
whole to a twenty-lourth part. As a sovereign State, 



36 

a, claim to make laws, not only for herself, but for 
others. Philosophically, politically, morally con- 
sidered, it is an inversion of all human reasoning ; it 
cannot be conceived without confusion of thought ; 
it cannot be expressed without solecism of language, 
and terms of self-contradiction. 

Its most hideous aspect is, not that its practical 
operation must issue in a severance of the Union, 
but that it substitutes physical force in the place of 
deliberate legislation. Stripped of the sophistical 
argumentation in which this doctrine has been habi- 
ted, its naked nature is an effort to organize insurrec- 
tion against the laws of the United States; to inter- 
pose the arm of State sovereignty between rebellion 
and the halter, and to rescue the traitor from the 
gibbet. The plan which it proposes, if pursued by 
merely individual association, would be levying war 
against the United States. It would not the less be 
levying war against the Union, if conducted ijnder 
the auspices of State sovereignty ; but as a State 
cannot be punished for treason. Nullification would 
case herself in the complete steel of sovereign power, 
as the heroes of ancient poetry were furnished with 
panoply from the armory of the gods. 

You have seen, my fellow citizens, from the De- 
claration of Independence, that the States of this 
confederation were the offspring of the Union ; that 
their sovereignty is not, and never was, a sovereignty 
as defined by Blackstone and the English lawyers, 
identical with unlimited power ; that sovereignty, 
thus defined, is in direct contradiction to the Decla- 
ration of Independence, and incompatible with the 
nature of our institutions ; that the States, united, 



36 

and the States, separate, are both sovereign, but 
creatures of the people, and possess none but dele- 
gated powers ; that the power of nullifying an act of 
Congress, never has been delegated to any one 
State, or to any partial combination of States, and 
that any, and every attempt at such nullification, by 
one or more States, less than the number required, 
and otherwise than in the forms prescribed for 
amendment of the Constitution, would, however col- 
ored, and however varnished, be neither more nor 
less than treason, skulking under the shelter of 
despotism. 

Nullification is the provocative to that brutal and 
foul contest of force, which has hitherto baffled all 
the efforts of the European, and Southern American 
nations, to introduce among them constitutional gov- 
ernments of liberty and order. It strips us of that 
peculiar and unimitated characteristic of all our 
legislation — free debate. It makes the bayonet the 
arbiter of law ; it has no argument but the thunder- 
bolt. It were senseless to imagine that twenty-three 
States of the Union would suffer their laws to be 
trampled upon by the despotic mandate of one. 
The act of nullification would itself be null and void. 
Force must be called in to execute the law of the 
Union. Force must be applied by the nullifying 
State to resist its execution — 

" Ate, hot from Hell, 
" Cries, Havoc ! and lets slip the dogs of war." 

The blood of brethren is shed by each other. The 
citizen of the nullifying State is a traitor to his 
country, by obedience to the law of his State ; a 
traitor to his State, by obedience to the law of his 



37 

country. The scaflfold and the battle-field stream 
alternately with the blood of their victims. Let this 
agent but once intrude upon your deliberations, and 
Freedom will take her flight for heaven. The De- 
claration of Independence will become a philosophical 
dream, and uncontrolled, despotic sovereignties will 
trample with impunity, through a long career of after 
ages, at interminable or exterminating war with 
one another, upon the indefeasible and unalienable 
rights of man. 

The event of a conflict in arms, between the 
Union and one of its members, whether terminating 
in victory or defeat, would be but an alternative of 
calamity to all. In the holy records of antiquity, we 
have two examples of a confederation ruptured by 
the severance of its members ; one of which resulted, 
after three desperate battles, in the extermination of 
the seceding tribe. And the victorious people, in- 
stead of exulting in shouts of triumph, "came to the 
House of God, and abode there till even before God ; 
and lifted up their voices, and wept sore, and said, — 
O Lord God of Israel, why is this come to pass in 
Israel, that there should be to-day one tribe lacking 
in Israel ? " The other was a successful example 
of resistance against tyrannical taxation, and severed 
forever the confederacy, the fragments forming sep- 
arate kingdoms ; and from that day, their history 
presents an unbroken series of disastrous alliances, 
and exterminating wars — of assassinations, conspira- 
cies, revolts, and rebellions, until both parts of the 
confederacy sunk in tributary servitude to the nations 
around them ; till the countrymen of David and 
iSolomon hung their harps upon the willows of Baby- 



38 

Ion, and were totally lost amidst the multitudes of 
the Chaldean and Assyrian monarchies, " the most 
despised portion of their slaves."* 

In these mournful memorials of their fate, we may 
behold the sure, too sure prognostication of our own, 
from the hour when force shall be substituted for 
deliberation in the settlement of our Constitutional 
questions. This is the deplorable alternative — the 
extirpation of the seceding member, or the never 
ceasing struggle of two rival confederacies, ultimately 
bending the neck of both under the yoke of foreign 
domination, or the despotic sovereignty of a conqueror 
at home. May Heaven avert the omen ! The desti- 
nies, not only of our posterity, but of the human race, 
are at stake. 

Let no such melancholy forebodings intrude upon 
the festivities of this anniversary. Serene skies and 
balmy breezes are not congenial to the climate of 
freedom. Progressive improvement in the condition 
of man is apparently the purpose of a superintending 
Providence. That purpose will not be disappointed. 
In no delusion of national vanity, but with a feeling 
of profound gratitude to the God of our Fathers, let 
us indulge the cheering hope and belief, that our coun- 
try and her people have been selected as instruments 
for preparing and maturing much of the good yet in 
reserve for the welfare and happiness of the human 
race. Much good has already been effected by the 
solemn proclamation of our principles, much more by 
the illustration of our example. The tempest which 
threatens desolation, may be destined only to purify 
the atmosphere. It is not in tranquil ease and en- 

* Tnritus and Gibbon. ^ 



39 

jojment that the active energies of mankind are dis- 
played. Toils and dangers are the trials of the soul. 
Doomed to the first by his sentence at the fall, man, 
by submission, converts them into pleasures. The 
last are since the fall the condition of his existence. 
To see them in advance, to guard against them by all 
the suggestions of prudence, to meet them with the 
composure of unyielding resistance, and to abide 
with firm resignation the final dispensation of Him 
who rules the ball, — these are the dictates of philoso- 
phy — these are the precepts of religion — these are the 
principles and consolations of patriotism ; — these re- 
main when all is lost — and of these is composed the 
spirit of independence — the spirit embodied in that 
beautiful personification of the poet, which may each 
of you, my countrymen, to the last hour of his life, 
apply to himself. 

" Thy spirit, Independence, let me share, 

Lord of the lion heart, and eagle eye ! 
Thy steps I follow, with my bosom bare. 

Nor heed the storm that howls along the sky."* 

In the course of nature, the voice which now ad- 
dresses you, must soon cease to be heard upon earth. 
Life and all which it inherits, lose of their value as 
it draws towards its close. But for most of you, my 
friends and neighbors, long and many years of futuri- 
ty are yet in store. May they be years of freedom — 
years of prosperity — years of happiness, ripening for 
immortality ! But, were the breath which now gives 
utterance to my feelings, the last vital air I should 
draw, my expiring words to you and your children 
should be, independence and union forever ! 

* Smollett. 



40 



NOTE. 

The following version of the 149th Psalm was sung by 
th e Choir, immediately before the delivery of the Oration. 

1. 

Sing to the Lord a song of praise ; 

Assemble, ye who love his name ; 
Let congregated millions raise 

Triumphant Glory's loud acclaim. 
From earth's remotest regions come ; 

Come greet your Maker and your King ; 
With harp, with timbrel, and with drum. 

His praise let hill and valley sing. 

2. 

Your praise the Lord will not disdain, 

The humble soul is his delight ; 
Saints, on your couches swell the strain. 

Break the dull stillness of the night. 
Rejoice in glory ! Bid the storm. 

Bid thunder's voice his praise expand ; 
And while your lips the chorus form, 

Grasp for the fight his vengeful brand. 

3. 

Go forth in arms ! Jehovah reigns ; 

Their graves let foul oppressors find ; 
Bind all their sceptred kings in chains ; 

Their peers with iron fetters bind. 
Then to the Lord shall praise ascend ; 

Then all mankind, with one accord. 
And Freedom's voice, till time shall end, 

In pealing anthems — Praise the Lord. 



■lilt 

017 136 324 fl W 



